Now All Roads Lead to France

by Matthew Hollis (Norton)

This elegant and melancholy biography of Edward Thomas, the poet of English rural life who was killed in the First World War, centers on his brief but vital friendship with Robert Frost. Each man had come to consider himself a failure, but served as the private inspiration and public champion of the other. Still, Thomas later felt stung on reading Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken,” which he considered a rebuke to his own irresoluteness in writing and in life. Hollis makes the ingenious case that Thomas’s embrace of poetry after years of timid false starts was his greatest act of courage, whereas his enlistment in the Army was really an indulgence of insecurities about his vocation. Hollis, himself a poet, describes Thomas’s death with beautiful economy: “He fell without a mark on his body.” ♦